Kate Middleton: the female body in the post-Berlusconi media

The publication of
topless photos of the Duchess of Cambridge, and the backlash it evoked, reveal an uneasy and gendered understanding of privacy in British, French and other countries' media, that the oldest tactics are still deployed to humiliate women, and how life in the public sphere is filtered through Berlusconi lenses.

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No, it wasn’t the most thorny issue of what should or should
not be published in the public sphere in the last week – the crude, division-reinforcing
‘Innocence
of Muslims’ video and the problematic response to it was September’s most
significant demonstration of how (not) to handle unhelpful and poisonous public
discourse. But in the week since photographs
of the Duchess of Cambridge topless were published in a French gossip magazine,
the reaction has revealed some curious and contradictory concerns about ideas
of privacy, public identity, and concepts of sexual harassment as technology
develops. On the one hand, the general
response to the publication seemed admirable, at least by commentators and in
online discussions – a mixture
of a shrug and making fun of the magazine for doing something so juvenile. On the other hand, the baffled response by
the French magazine to how the British reacted as though the publication of the
photos were an ‘affront’, given British tabloid culture, reveals layers of
interwoven and unresolved questions to do with privacy, privilege and what is
considered humiliation.

I’m no fan of the monarchy, and the 2011
royal wedding in particular struck me as a regressive re-marrying of
empire, state Christianity and Tory-tinged visions of public pageantry to
entertain the austerity-crippled masses.
At a time when British social and economic inequalities are ossifying, the
elevation of Kate Middleton as cultural icon seems curiously
aligned with the Tory presentation of Samantha Cameron as a model wife – an
almost-blank cipher of generic, impossible-to-cause-offence feminine
‘tastefulness’ to which fashion magazines encourage British women to aspire at
a time when austerity and recession chew away at British women’s daily
lives. At a time when British women
should be getting angry at how they’re being
increasingly pushed out of power, not keeping calm and carrying on. So to defend Kate Middleton’s right to
privacy is not to deny that she benefits, grossly and daily, from myriad
privileges that it cannot be said that she has fairly earned. Frankly, we shouldn’t know who Kate Middleton
is, because she has done nothing noteworthy other than getting married.

But this in turn is
also the part of why the publication of private photographs of her were a
violation, an expression of the cheapest instincts in ourselves, and a kind of
sexual harassment. Kate Middleton has
done nothing to grant her a place in the public eye except for getting married:
harassing her because she chose to marry someone is effectively stating that
she is defined by her relation to a man.
And more significant than this Diana-reminiscent incident of a harassing
of a woman because of who she married is the response to the publication of the
photographs in Britain and France – Britain, the country of The Sun’s Page 3 and that stereotype of our blushing
Anglo Saxon prudishness, France with its recent Strauss-Kahn saga and its
heritage of Mitterrand-era
commitment to ‘personal privacy’ safe from the press. Somehow, yet again, our contradictory
attitudes to the public and the private, to privilege and to gossip, are
getting played out on the terrain of a woman’s body.

The French editor of Closer
argued (perhaps surprised that the magazine’s ‘scoop’ had been met with such
vitriol in Britain) that there was nothing
distasteful in the photographs, merely pictures of a young couple in love –
an argument that was so frustrating precisely because there is of course
nothing wrong or shameful about nudity,
but curious that such an argument be evoked to imply that Kate Middleton does
not have the right to decide for herself
whether the general public can see her without her clothes on. It was all the
more frustrating for how it therefore made the widespread condemnation of the
photographs by British commentators look (how Anglo-Saxon) prudish and
moralising – not least in light of the publication of photographs
in the British media of Prince Harry only weeks before.

Hypocrisy abounds, of
course – the hypocrisy of the usually-prurient British tabloids railing at
the French media for ‘hounding’ Kate as they ‘hounded’ the last British
Princess who, in 1997, died – as portions of the British press quickly indignantly
reminded them – on French soil; the hypocrisy of the royals to suddenly assert
their right to privacy given their willing, Hello!-magazine-posing
participation in the embarrassing soap opera that is modern monarchy – an
element of snobbery in the implication that they don’t deserve to be treated
like other celebrities, but rather granted a unique and higher level of press
coverage only on their terms. The
hypocrisy of tabloid culture as a whole, mass embarrassing archetype that it is
of the high school bully who tells you you’re their new best friend before
telling the rest of the class that you’re a slut.

So let us take one problematic issue at a time: for
instance, the French media –remember how insistent many French media outlets were
in 2011 that the accusations against Strauss-Kahn were either surely fabricated
or surely prurient to be concerned about.
While the French media landscape is varied and the actions of a gossip
magazine like Closer can’t be read as
the actions of the country’s journalists as a whole, an outsider in the country
couldn’t help but wonder why all this ‘privacy’ that was evoked to quash the quite
concerning evidence that misogyny was rife in the higher echelons of the PS
and French political life was suddenly, in 2012, no longer any concern. The two
incidents taken together at a glance look like a textbook demonstration of the
use of the ‘private sphere’ defence in a way that benefits men. This was the
failure of large sections of the French media and commentators in 2011: to rush
to the defence of Strauss-Kahn’s privacy while both peddling misogynistic treatment of the alleged victim of the assault and failing to acknowledge
that there was a legitimate issue of concern in how French
political life treats women.

The problem of 2012 in France is whether lessons have really
been learned from 2011: in Hollande’s
France, with its much-celebrated 50/50
gender-equal cabinet and the appointment
of Najat Vallaud-Belkacem as the new women’s minister to address gender
inequity in public life, the ugliness of
2011 still ripples the surface – the
wolf-whistling at Minister Cecile Duflot for wearing a dress in Parliament earlier
this summer opened the issue of the treatment of women in politics, just as the
new Presidency offered a chance for the country to turn over a new leaf. And, as with the Closer defence that Kate Middleton’s photographs are nothing to
worry about, the defence that the wolf-whistlers were merely ‘complimenting’
Cecile Duflot seemed again to be a comprehensive missing-of-the-point of the
difficulty of being female in public life.
The Belgian
film on sexual harassment, Femme de
la Rue, struck a chord across Europe this summer for articulating a
prominent reality of women’s experiences.
Over the summer, the issue of sexual harassment cropped up across Europe
like weather-forecast symbols of a heatwave, the photographs of the British princess arriving in September like a storm.

Which leads to the issue of why what Closer did to Kate Middleton is sexual harassment. No, there is nothing wrong with nudity or
sunbathing topless. It’s removing Kate’s
right to decide, for herself, whether or not she be photographed topless that’s
violating, the same way the treatment documented in Femme de la Rue is violating and the treatment of Cecile Duflot not
‘a compliment’ – the photographs had a more painful cultural resonance than the
publication of photographs of Prince Harry stripping naked with his friends in
private. The bullying is gendered
because our concepts of how to humiliate others are gendered. The easiest way
to humiliate a woman, as Femme de la Rue shows
us, is to remind her that she’s just a pair of tits when it comes down to
it. The very fact that Kate Middleton
has more power than most women in the world could ever dream of perhaps even
reinforced the sense that this was a diplomatic-incident re-enactment of the
playground: for what better way to redress the balance of power with a young
woman who seems aloof, who keeps herself closed to you, who is (in that patriarchal
trope of female-innocence) exalted for her ‘tastefulness’ and ‘dignity’ than to
make a dirty joke about her, write graffiti on the bathroom wall about her,
print pictures of her naked, try to embarrass her about her body, her private
acts? Not so dignified now, are you,
Kate? the action seemed to say. There was something in the act of
publishing a photograph of her in a moment of vulnerability – the well-behaved
princess for once doing something a bit normal and un-posed – that smelt of the
desire to teach her a lesson: the media giveth and the media taketh away.

Kate was, as official palace statements declared,
humiliated and upset. But even aside
from the obvious fact that no-one’s privilege negates their right to privacy,
the photographs were also an indirect affront to others. It sent the message not just to Kate Middleton
but to other women that this form of sexual harassment is okay – a message that
is particularly concerning if we consider how our concepts of ‘sexual
harassment’ have failed to adequately evolve with new technology, as the
tabloid-culture of ‘up-skirt shots’ and ‘leaked sex videos’ further warps our
understanding of intimacy and consent in the age of the internet. Kira Cochrane
reported for the Guardian this
weekend on the rise of bullying of both ‘celebrity’
and ‘non-celebrity’ women in the era of camera-phones by using private or
sexual photos of them obtained without their knowledge or consent.

So, we have misogyny, power, and lurid gossip-media…feel
like something’s missing in the picture? Oh don’t worry, he’s here. Yes, Berlusconi – the man who made the last
year better just because we didn’t have to say his name so often anymore when
discussing European politics – in fact owned the media outlet that originally
published the photographs of Kate Middleton (a fact which led to some
conspiracy-theorising that this was Berlusconi’s
revenge on perceived snubs by the British monarchy, according to the Daily Beast’s Barbie Latza Nadeau). The publication of the photos by a
Berlusconi-owned media outlet should thus be a good opportunity for all
European media to reflect on how much damage the former Italian prime minister
has had on media standards even outside of Italy, not least in respect to the treatment
of women. The 2009 Italian
documentary Il Corpo delle
Donne analysed how, under Berlusconi’s effective 95% ownership of
Italian media, public depictions of women were infantilised, used (often
literally) only as decorative props on Italian television, essentially making
invisible from public life any woman who was not willing to pneumatically,
breathlessly play along with the narrow, porn-ified role granted for them in
the media space. Journalists who tried
to report on the dual dominance of corruption and misogyny
while Berlusconi held the dual role of head of state and media mogul found
themselves intimidated, critics invariably dismissed as prudes.

In such a climate of media-dominance on the European level
either of Berlusconi-owned media or its imitators – an unreal world of
commodified Jessica Rabbit cartoonishness as the only media template for female
identity, a world of paparazzi ‘up-skirt’ photographs, French ministers howled
at for wearing a dress, and power-politics and diplomatic incidents playing out
on the terrain of what a young woman does innocuously with her husband (for can
you think of anything so strangely natural in the face of all this, than that
someone wanted to sunbathe without intrusion? It all feels so strangely old, Biblical even, like some
contemporary echo of the Bathsheba story) – perhaps the question should not be
about freedom of the press or whether Kate was in a public place or the
technical issue of the rights of the media versus the right to privacy. Perhaps instead a simple reflection would be
more helpful – how many of us actually enjoy living in this climate?

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